A Night At The Oscars

It Is a strange and beautiful moment. I walk up the stairs of The Funnel and there is Elliott Smith, mid-soundcheck, singing a loving, flawless cover of Big Star's 'Thirteen'. I know it's for the benefit of the sound tech but it feels like it's for my own private pleasure. A little self-delusion never did anybody any harm. He follows this with 'Jealous Guy'. Huzzah!

It's weird. The last time I saw Smith on a stage was in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles during this year's Oscars ceremony. (Regrettably, I myself was just watching it on TV in my Rathmines flat.) Having been nominated for Best Original Song for his contributions to the soundtrack of Good Will Hunting, Smith found himself in the bizarre situation of being in direct competition with Celine Dion.

One minute we were being subjected to the blasphemously bland 'My Heart Will Go On', excrementally doled out by her 1,000-piece orchestra, the next we saw our card-carrying Chilton fanatic wandering sheepishly onto the stage with his acoustic guitar to perform 'Miss Misery'. He looked about as comfortable as a Tibetan monk in Stringfellows.

"I think that's probably what everyone there was thinking too . . . That's what I was thinking!" he laughs, dragging on a cigarette in his dressing room.

What on earth did Smith make of the whole experience?

"It was really weird," he says, bewildered at the memory. "Just surreal. But is was sort of fun just because it was so strange."

Did did he rub shoulder-pads with the great and the good?

"I met a couple of people who were in the movie. I met Fey Wray, the woman who was in the original King Kong, but other than that, I didn't go introducing myself to people. It was quite something but I'm pretty glad it's all done with. I remember sitting there and thinking 'man, this is not my scene'. But I don't think it's anybody's scene. I'd say that most people there would rather be making a movie than sitting through a four-hour award show. At least if you're watching it on TV, you can get up and walk around."

Elliott Smith has the physique of a body-building male model and more tattoos than a convention of deaf army drummers. But he is a thoroughly amiable bloke, an unreconstructed slacker upon whom The Dude in The Big Lebowski could have been based.

Did the Oscars make things happen for him in the States?

"I guess. I mean, yeah, a lot of people watched that show. Now people come up to me on the street and so on. But it was so far away from what I usually do that I don't know how much it really helps me to do what I do. It's just an odd, happy accident."

What he usually does is write supremely memorable songs that range from acoustic folk to pristine power pop. He is relatively unknown in Europe but his new album, Either/Or, would be a good choice come the end-of-year critics' polls. Lush and laidback, it drips with the sort of vocal harmonies that fans of Matthew Sweet or, why not, Simon & Garfunkel, will applaud. He played all the instruments on the album himself, having picked and strummed his way through two previous, cheaply recorded solo albums, Roman Candle ('94) and Elliott Smith ('96) which our good friends in Domino Records will be re-issuing any moment now.

However, his earliest inspiration was when he heard 'Rocky Racoon' from The Beatles' White Album at the age of five. His first band were called Heatmiser, whom Smith describes as "loud rock with a toe in punk . . . for some reason, the main people who liked us were jocks - big dumb guys who would come looking for a fight with some other big dumb guy."

He's led a fairly nomadic existence thus far. Born in Nebraska, his family moved when he was at an early age to Texas, where he lived in several different towns.

"Mainly, though, I lived south of Dallas, Texas," he recalls, "in a place which was lower middle class, white, and where all the boys just constantly fought with each other. I wanted to move somewhere where I didn't hear people say, 'I'm gonna kick your ass, Smith' every week."

These days, he's based in New York, a city with which he has a love/loathe relationship. "There's too many hot-tempered, angry people in New York," he complains. "It's really great in a lot of ways but there's so many people in chronically bad moods that it's such a drag. Sometimes I don't even want to set foot outside my door because I know I'll have to encounter someone who's just really pissed off about something or other."

As the saying goes, if you can keep a calm head when all about you are losing theirs, the odds are your name's Elliott Smith.

• Either/Or is out now on Domino.